In the ranks of seniors graduating this weekend, we have students who earned the Chief’s Award from the City of St. Paul for helping a woman in distress in 2014, a student who served as an ambassador on a Minnesota trade mission to Mexico, and students who have done research on everything from political cynicism to drying breadfruit. Read a roundup of the stories the Newsroom has written about Class of 2017 students since they arrived on campus.

Van Laarhoven, who graduated in December, passed all of the requirements to become an Associate of the Society of Actuaries (ASA), and graduated in two and a half years, a stunning accomplishment that has left many wanting to know the secret to his success.

This week's notes feature faculty, an alumna and a student from the departments of chemistry, history, mathematics, modern and classical languages, and sociology and criminal justice, and the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity.

Until recently, many biologists also viewed themselves as pure experimentalists with no need for mathematics in their field, but advances in experimental techniques have generated huge amounts of data, and without mathematical modeling and analysis it would be impossible for biology to make sense of all these data.